THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON: A Hangout On The Gulf

Cinema has pretty ingrained ideas about the American South, some earned and some not, that make it a setting both instantly recognizable and never wantonly chosen. With its sweltering heat, backbreaking rural economy, and tough people who make it their home, there’s a certain rough and tumble respectability you can get away with when your characters are trolling bayous that’s hard to pull off if they’re anywhere else.

The Peanut Butter Falcon mines these tropes for all their worth, telling a winding tale of friendship and growth through the Deep South that is seemingly out of time. It’s mainly about Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young man with Down syndrome who is bored as hell at the nursing home where he’s being housed. He breaks out and sets off for the training school of former wrestler The Salt Water Redneck, teaming up with the troubled Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) and the sympathetic nursing home employee Eleanor (Dakota Johnson).

The group sets a lackadaisical pace, but that’s not entirely what I mean by the movie seeming out of time. Their journey is through fields and waterways, avoiding the highway because Tyler has royally pissed off some of the locals. It’s a road movie without the road, pointedly sticking its travelers in situations that could have taken place fifty years ago just as easily as today, and it’s this time away from regular life is the catalyst for their modest change.

Let’s Make Friends

All this meandering means there’s plenty of time to get to know Zak, Tyler, and Eleanor, so the movie really hinges on how much you actually want to be around these characters. If you find any of them annoying or underwritten or simply uninteresting, then you won’t be very into The Peanut Butter Falcon. Unfortunately we all like hanging around different people, so I can’t tell you outright whether their chemistry will jive with yours. Rest assured, though, that the three do have a charming, good-natured vibe, so even though the exploration of them isn’t very deep, they are quite pleasant to be around.

Part of that is because writer/director duo Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz have given the film an innate gentleness, a sense that no matter how bad things get, these three will come out on the other side. Sure, Tyler is your stereotypical scruffy bad boy (hello neck beard) and he starts out the film in a pretty grim place; he steals some crab and sets a fire, but LaBeouf keeps an unnamed sadness weighing on him that belies any real malice. The actual bad guys are the father/son pair violently exerting control over their little corner of the world (the father is played by John Hawkes, who is one of many expertly cast faces that make their archetypes instantly identifiable).

So when Tyler meets up with a lost Zak, there’s little question whether he will help the guy out or not. Even more enlivening is his instance on treating him like a buddy, an equal, with no talking down to him simply because of his Down syndrome. His reasoning for this is succinctly illuminated in a scene between him and Eleanor, and from then on any worry that this will turn into a cringe-inducing inspirational tale is assuaged.

Gottsagen (who has Down syndrome himself) proves to be a genuinely funny performer with a great sense of timing, but he can also evoke a fed up attitude with his lot in life when needed. His character is no less drawn, and hence Gottsagen has no easier task, than the other leads, and he proves more than capable of keeping the audience engaged.

If anyone gets the short stick here it’s Johnson, who has considerably less time to round out her character than either LaBeouf or Gottsagen. She’s another bit of perfectly on the nose casting, though, as she rolls into these backwaters with an air of otherness that tells you as much about her character’s background as it sets you up for some surprises. Johnson handles these revelations with a soft touch, though, so her character always feels entwined in the adventure and not like some spoilsport coming around to the fun. She has good reason for clicking with these two, and the group’s natural feel goes a long way to making them appealing to the audience.

Mismanaging Genre

The Peanut Butter Falcon is, seemingly by design, a rather small film, which works perfectly when it’s trying to be the gentle hangout movie that it mostly is. The problem comes when Nilson and Schwartz try to tie in bits of other genres, mostly notably a bit of magical realism, which feel largely unsupported by the rest of the movie.

Magical realism in particular requires some setup because it takes the story squarely out of the world we live in and into a place with entirely different rules. Establishing this early is key to not losing the audience, and you can do this by either explicitly including magical elements from the beginning or cluing in the audience through some grandiose element of the production. If one of your characters is, say, walking around in a tux while everyone else is in modern garb and no one remarks on it, then the audience is going to pick up that there’s something going on that will be explained later.

Having elements of the unreal, or at least the warped, is even a prominent part of the American South on film, so while The Peanut Butter Falcon isn’t including anything that’s necessarily out of left field, there’s slight cues missing that would’ve made the whole package work more seamlessly. Leaning more on the landscape with wide shots or integrating strong religious ties (the film only includes one explicitly religious character, a blind black man, which, yikes) would’ve tied it more closely to the southern gothic subgenre and allowed it to get away with these elements. But alas, this subgenre isn’t distinctly evoked, and the film feels a tad loose because of it.

Conclusion: The Peanut Butter Falcon

The Peanut Butter Falcon is more interested in getting you to like it than in having much to say or taking you on a great journey, and you know what, that’s okay. As The Onion’s satirical “review” of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again said: not everything has to be Schindler’s List. And like so much satire, that’s pretty true. It’s fine for a movie to be fun, heartwarming, and not much else.

What did you think of The Peanut Butter Falcon? Did you take it as a hangout movie or did you think there was more to it? Let us know in the comments!

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